01UndatedHistory isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
04UndatedIs there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
05Undated[Flaubert] didn’t just hate the railway as such; he hated the way it flattered people with the illusion of progress. What was the point of scientific advance without moral advance? The railway would merely permit more people to move about, meet and be stupid together.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
07UndatedI didn't doubt for a moment that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic combination of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
08UndatedWomen scheme when they are weak, they lie out of fear. Men scheme when they are strong, they lie out of arrogance.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
09UndatedPride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
10UndatedMost people, in my opinion, steal much of what they are. If they didn't what poor items they would be.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
11UndatedThe greatest patriotism is to tell your country when it is behaving dishonorably, foolishly, viciously.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
12UndatedThe best form of government is one that is dying, because that means it’s giving way to something else.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
13UndatedWhat is history? Any thoughts, Webster?''History is the lies of the victors,' I replied, a little too quickly.'Yes, I was rather afraid you'd say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. ...'Finn?''"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation." (quoting Patrick Lagrange)Julian Barnes / quote ↗
14UndatedHe thought of trying to explain something he had recently noticed about himself: that if anyone insulted him, or one of his friends, he didn't really mind--or not much, anyway. Whereas if anyone insulted a novel, a story, a poem that he loved, something visceral and volcanic occurred within him. He wasn't sure what this might mean--except perhaps that he had got life and art mixed up, back to front, upside down.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
15UndatedArt belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history; heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake. But which people, and who defines them? He always thought of his own art as anti-aristocratic. Did he write, as his detractors maintained, for a bourgeois cosmopolitan elite? No. Did he write, as his detractors wanted him to, for the Donbass miner weary from his shift and in need of a soothing pick-me-up? No. He wrote music for everyone and no one. He wrote music for those who best appreciated the music he wrote, regardless of social origin. He wrote music for the ears that could hear. And he knew, therefore, that all true definitions of art are circular, and all untrue definitions of art ascribe to it a specific function.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
16UndatedArt is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art's sake: it exists for people's sake.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
17UndatedHistory is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
18UndatedHistory isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
19UndatedI remember what Old Joe Hun said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history—Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
20UndatedIf a memory wasn't a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
21UndatedWhy slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
22UndatedIf you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
23UndatedWhat could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves - the music of our being - which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is string and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history.Julian Barnes / quote ↗
24UndatedLoving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?Julian Barnes / quote ↗
